UCLA In the News January 15, 2019

UCLA Professor John Rogers, director of the university’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, interpreted the current impasse between the district and the union as a reflection of opposite reactions LAUSD’s current financial and enrollment woes. “The district is thinking about how they can contain costs and deal with a growing charter school sector by devolving the district over time as a portfolio of schools,” he said. “While teachers think the way forward is to more broadly improve the quality of its own educational program, only sometimes acknowledging how much spending that requires.”

If PG&E gets out of costs due to climate change, the burden falls to insurance companies, homeowners and business owners, public agencies, or all of the above, explains Sean Hecht, co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the University of California–Los Angeles. “It’s beyond question that climate change is one of the factors exacerbating fire risks,” he says. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that the company is off the hook. Someone has to pay for these costs. There’s not any more or less reason for the utility to pay for those costs than the insurance companies, the government, or other institutions.”

While able-bodied people can usually maneuver around ­e-scooters, the elderly and disabled can have a much harder time, said Wally Ghurabi, medical director of the Nethercutt Emergency Center at the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica. “I’ve seen pedestrians injured by scooters with broken hips, multiple bone fractures, broken ribs and joint injuries and soft tissue injuries like lacerations and deep abrasions,” he said, estimating he sees several people injured by e-scooters each week.

“I’m really at a loss to determine why he hasn’t” subpoenaed Trump already, said Harry Litman, a University of California [Los Angeles] law professor and former federal prosecutor. “It just doesn’t make sense to me.” Although the president’s lawyers would undoubtedly fight a subpoena in court, “I think it’s really pretty clear [Mueller] would win,” Litman said.

“One question is whether those ‘replicas’ would be ‘conscious’ or not,” said UCLA’s Martin Monti. “The answer may well be yes, depending on which theory of consciousness you subscribe to. Alternatively, she is now a philosophical zombie: she looks like you and me, she walks and talks like you and me, but she has no conscious experience (and no, this type of zombie does not eat human flesh).”

Dr. [Ziva] Cooper, research director of the UCLA Cannabis Research Initiative, went further: “We as a committee also concluded that a history of cannabis use is associated with better cognitive outcomes in people diagnosed with psychotic disorders. The blatant omission of this conclusion exemplifies the one-sided nature of some articles. Nonetheless, the strong association between cannabis use and schizophrenia means that people with predisposing risk factors for schizophrenia should most certainly abstain from using cannabis.”

“We’re way better off than we were 25 years ago,” said John Wallace, a civil engineering professor at UCLA who focuses on earthquake readiness. “But we still have a lot more we can do.”… Wallace said it quickly became clear following the Northridge quake that, while California had made progress since ’71, it still had a long way to go to make buildings and roads more quake resilient.

The U.S. is an outlier in not offering mandatory paid family leave nationwide; nearly every other country in the world guarantees some kind of paid leave in weeks or months, according to the World Policy Analysis Center at UCLA.

Researchers who home in on a single age may overlook differences that appear over time, says Mirella Dapretto, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, and lead researcher on the adolescent study. “You miss some of the bigger picture.”

Co-presented by the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA and Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center, “The Great Tamer” emptied a lot of audience expectations about dance and theater to depict the pointless processes and shallow pleasures in our lives, along with our destruction of the environment and our unwillingness to face the consequences of our choices. In its deep negativity, “The Great Tamer” is a call for reformation and perhaps also a reminder that those huge fusillades of golden darts may not always rescue us from ourselves.

The state must do something. About 10 percent of its nonelderly population lacks coverage. A study by UCLA and the University of California at Berkeley last year projected a steady rise, finding that Republicans’ Obamacare sabotage and other factors would increase the uninsurance rate to 13 percent by 2023, with about 1 million more uninsured Californians , barring a policy shift.

(Commentary written by UCLA’s Jonathan Fielding) The issue is bigger than you may have thought. It’s a global problem, according to the World Health Organization; almost 1 in 10 people falls ill every year from eating contaminated food and 420,000 die worldwide. Our own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that each year, roughly 1 in 6 Americans — about 48 million people — gets sick from foodborne diseases; 128,000 of these require hospitalization and 3,000 die.

“We need to revisit the issue of Proposition 13 and the systematic defunding of education,” said Kent Wong, director of the University of California, Los Angeles, Labor Center. “But for the school district to say we don’t have the money, there’s nothing that can be done, it’s disingenuous.”